Page 75 of Confessions of the Dead

“You can at least try to look sexy. Marcie did.”

And that made her angry.

The blood boiled within her.

People always talked down to her, disrespected her. Danny had been one of the few who didn’t, and now he was gone. Everyone treated her like they were better than her, and now she was letting this guy … yes, she was letting him do this to her. She could either stop it or let it happen;thatwas totally in her control.

Hannah had no idea where these thoughts came from, but she welcomed them, because they beat back the fear, made her feel strong. She placed one hand on the edge of the grandfather clock, and ran the other down the side of her breast with a mischievous grin growing on her face. “Better?”

Malcolm bobbed his head. “Yeah.”

“Good.”

Hannah eased her hand around the back of the grandfather clock and yanked it forward with every ounce of strength she could muster. The large clock tipped and came down on Malcolm with a satisfying crunch before he could scuttle out of the way. She snatched her phone and the screwdriver from his hands and ran.

57

Riley

“WHA … WHAT JUST HAPPENED?” RILEYstuttered as a cloud of black smoke drifted toward the ceiling of the cave.

When Robby cut the crow, its blood smoked, but it didn’t end there. He pulled his hand away just as the feathers started to smolder, then crumbled. There was no other way to describe it. It was like the bird was actually some kind of delicate sculpture and it collapsed under its own weight. The pins were still in the cardboard, but there was nothing left of the bird but a pile of black ash.

For the first time, Riley noticed the other black stains on the cardboard. “Are those spots from other birds?”

Mason nodded. “The ones from the diner.”

Riley watched in stunned silence as Robby repeated the process with the remaining two birds from his backpack. When they were gone, he carefully collected the black dust in three ziplock bags and labeled each with a black marker.

“They smoke, but they don’t actually get hot,” Robby explained.“They melt, but they’re not damp. Just the opposite. The dust that’s left over is so dry it’s like all the water vanished from their bodies in a second or two.”

“When you cut into them,” Riley said softly.

Robby removed the pins from the cardboard and placed them back in the plastic container he’d gotten them from. “Did you ever eat astronaut ice cream?”

“Sure.”

“When they freeze-dry it and remove the water, they compress it into those square bricks. The overall size is reduced by a factor of seven. If they didn’t compress it, it would turn into powder. I think the smoke that appears when I cut the birds is the water leaving their bodies, but since they don’t get compressed, they dist … dist …”

“Disintegrate,” Evelyn chimed in.

“Yeah, disintegrate.”

“Why would the water leave their bodies when you cut them?” Riley asked.

“Because there’s something wrong with it,” Evelyn said. “Duh.”

Robby’s gaze drifted to the small bottle of water they’d collected at the town’s tower. “Seventy-three percent of the human brain is made up of water. If the brain gets dehydrated, cells don’t work right. It can cause anything from headaches to poor judgment.”

“Hallucinations,” Evelyn added.

Mason grunted. “Like slime monsters swimming in your cereal bowl.”

Riley looked back at the stained cardboard. That didn’t make any sense. “Birds don’t drink the same water as us.”

Mason pressed down on his baseball bat and twisted the tip around in the dirt at his feet. “The birds drink from the lakes and streams. Rainwater, sometimes. The water in that tower comes from underground. Streams below us feeding down off the mountain. It all comes from the same place.”

Riley thought of her water glass next to the bathroom sink. The other one she kept in the kitchen. She always drank from the tap, her mom, too. “But don’t they … I don’t know … clean it somehow?”

---